5 Killer Tips to Select a Blog Theme

One of the basic building block of a Blog is it’s theme. Theme represent your work and how professionally you are blogging. Most of new blogs, don’t pay much attention to theme and use tons of widgets, use a theme which can accomodate more ads or keep changing their Blog theme at regular interval. This is one of the biggest mistake which you can make in your Blogging career. Selecting a Blog theme is not an easy task and finding one perfect theme is endless task. Here at ShoutMeLoud, we are using Thesis theme from last 2 years and this is no doubt one of the perfect SEO optimized theme, but again default look of theme is quote boring and many users who are not good with CSS and PHP and don’t have money to hire some one, such theme is not perfect choice. But if you are good at it or have budget to customize your theme, you should check out Thesis theme review by Harsh.

Now, for the Bloggers, who are not really great with customization and need to choose a Blog theme, here are few things which I’m pointing out which will help you to determine the best theme for your Blog. There are many premium WordPress theme club out there, which will help you to download pre-designed themes for cheaper price and it will give your blog a professional look. For example, have a look at Elegant theme or wootheme collections, and you will be amazed to see beautiful theme for as low as 20-30$.

Unless your content is absolutely killer and often even then, the theme of your blog will play a crucial role in converting every chance visitor into a reader. Choosing a blog theme can be really confusing when facing so many choices! Here are some tips to make choosing a blog theme easier.

How to choose a blog theme

Professional or Personal

Is your blog personal or professional? You must first decide this, cause only then can you choose an appropriate theme. For a personal theme you can go for brightly colored, funky and snazzy ones but for a professional one its better to go for an office looking theme with more gray, maroon, dark blue, dark green type of combinations on a white background.

Light Background or Dark Background?

Go for a light background color with dark text, cause it is easier on the readers eyes. Darker backgrounds are good only for photo or design blogs with less writing, where the images come across well due to the background.

Content Theme

Does your content have a theme? If so you can add a customized touch to your blog theme or choose a blog theme accordingly. For example: If you blog is only about fish, then you can choose a fish blog theme with an underwater image for header or animated fish widget on the sidebar.

Simple, minimalist or Filled up, content rich?

This is your choice but always better to be clear about what you want before you come across a huge array of different themes for your blog. Do you want a simple theme with just the post and one or two widgets on the sidebar, or do you want a 3 or 4 columned blog with content filling every corner of it?

Color Scheme

Have a vague idea of a preferred color scheme. More sober greys, dark blue and maroon type colors or do you prefer bright greens, yellows and reds. However this should not affect which theme you choose. Almost all themes can easily be tweaked to change the color combination to one of your choice.

COMMENTs ( 22 )

It’s perfectly possible to achieve a design that is clean and simple enough to be gentle on the eye, but include enough content to get your point/adverts across. Take this blog for instance. The design is simple and clean, yet there’s still tons of room for information

I would like to add a point to already mentioned points here in comments and by the author herself and that is SEO. Being a blogger you would surely look for a proper theme that acts good with SEO as well.

In my opinion if you are thinking to buy any theme don’t forget to check how it stands for SEO.

Selecting a them is indeed a tough job and the points that Priyanka has listed really needs full attention. I know it, since I was trying to select a perfect theme for my needs at SpeakBindas and it took almost couple of months! Harsh know about it :)

Regarding the ‘simple or filled up’ point, I would have to say: ‘why not both?!’

It’s perfectly possible to achieve a design that is clean and simple enough to be gentle on the eye, but include enough content to get your point/adverts across. Take this blog for instance. The design is simple and clean, yet there’s still tons of room for information.

I think this is usually acheived by a great sidebar/header/footer, rather than the actual content area. Again, take the footer on this site. There’s loads of room in there for the categories and all different information (nice design Asnio! ;) ), yet it still looks nice and clean.

Sushant Magazine style theme are good because they showcase lots of content on homepage. Though it should be selected carefully, because many magazine style wordpress theme doesn’t provide great navigation.

For me, the best thing should be a white background that would make the text readable. After all, it’s a blog and not a poster. The main content is the *text*. So, always choose a white background rather than any fancy ones. Secondly, typography plays the most important role for the success of any blog.

Rishabh some nice point , but I see it the other ways. A blog which is dedicated to textual content should have white backgroound like blog on tutorials, Blogging, MMO and so on.
Blogs like Gaming, Hacking People prefer to see them on Black background, for some reason it matches with the niche of blog…
No doubt Typography matters in every type of blog. Thanks for your comment.